


My Pride, and My Vanity

by vamm_goda



Category: Angels & Airwaves, Bandom, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Ego Trips, He's not sure what it is, M/M, Originally Posted on LiveJournal, Prompt Fill, Rivalry, Tom has a message too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-08
Updated: 2012-01-08
Packaged: 2018-05-19 07:01:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5958052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vamm_goda/pseuds/vamm_goda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tom/Gerard AVA/MCR crossover: egos<br/>Prompt for the best friend of all :D</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Pride, and My Vanity

Tom’ll be the first to admit he has what might politely be called an enormous fucking ego _thank you, Atom_ , but the way he sees it he has pretty much every right to it. He’s not the absolute best, but he’s learned how to get things done the way he wants things to be done, and it’s worked for him. All his adolescent anger and rage, all his incoherent and childish feelings found an audience with a group of kids who knew exactly what he was talking about and that was the most awesome feeling in the world.

Gerard, on the other hand, burst onto the scene with a fucking _message_. He couldn’t just soak up the sheer awesome of being a rock star, he had to go and use it to go and preach shit about tolerance and acceptance and being yourself.

And Tom was all about equal rights and shit, he just . . . sorta forgot about that in between all those platinum records and such. But it always sorta hung around, made him think sometimes even when he didn’t want to.

Box Car Racer was awesome. It let him explore a little bit more of that edge without getting too far away from his comfort zone. He had David, the dude was heavy into the Straight Edge movement of SoCal, so that should count as being socially conscious in and of itself, really.

Except that something about that experience got under his skin in the worst way, got into his dreams where he couldn’t get away from it, and then he had Angels and Airwaves and he had something that he could sincerely actually do with it. He could take those little messages, the things he’d been hearing from Gerard all those years while he’d been dicking around with a guitar and . . . well, talking about dicks, and he could use them to make something better.

But the fact was, both of them were ring masters of their own private little circuses. They each did their own thing, engaged in their own ways. Gerard fed off of his audience, like one of those vampires he loved to doodle in his spare time, whereas Tom baited them, urged them to rise to him. That was what a front man did, he took the attention of the audience and gave them a single, distilled vision of the band to direct their attention on. It wasn’t ego, not really, but . . .

Well, okay. It was ego. A little. He liked the attention, it almost made him feel like he wasn’t the same screwup kid he’d been in school. He could soak it up and enjoy it, right? At least he wasn’t as bad as that fuckface Leto. But then he’d always look over and there’d be Gerard, sorta shrugging things off and talking about how his band had saved his life, like what he was doing was a public service instead of a fuck you to all the people who’d told him he couldn’t, and it just made Tom itch because there had to be an ego underneath all that talk of salvation and self deprecation. There had to be. No one ever got into this line of work just to save lives or whatever, he could have been a priest for that.

“Don’t you have an ego like, at all?”

Gerard’s eyes are huge in the bathroom mirror. “Jesus _Christ_ , did you just follow me into a bathroom?”

“Yes. Why don’t you have an ego.”

“I _do_ have an ego, thank you very much.” Gerard makes a confused face, thinks back. “Wait. That’s not something to be proud of. Fuck you.”

“No, seriously. You spent more time praising _David_ then you did talking about your new projects. I mean. Who _does_ that?”

“I do!”

“Apparently!” He’s exasperated, he knows that, makes a face right back at Gerard and it’s a much better one if he does say so himself. And then he smashes their lips together because . . . well, he’s not really sure why. It just sorta . . . happens. Like how avalanches happen, or something, one little tiny snowflake off balancing a whole mountainside until the whole thing slides down on top of him and smushes him into snow and squishy bits.

Probably kinda gross, but knowing Gerard he’d be turned on by that anyway.

He slams him against the wall and Gerard’s knees spread, let Tom settle his thigh between them and rub, and then Gerard’s thrusting against his thigh all hot and needy.

“Hey, so.” Tom pulls away to whisper into his ear, tongue tracing the shell. “I bet I can make you come in your pants just like this.”

“You can _not_!” Gerard squeaks, and Tom’s face twists into a triumphant smile that he buries into Gerard’s neck as he sucks in a bruise.

“ _There’s_ that ego. I fucking _knew_ it.”


End file.
